Regretfully, I am no longer actively developing BeOS software. If anyone is interested in obtaining rights to the source code for any of my BeOS programs, contact me. The BeOS pages on this site are archival in nature.

skeeter.gif (3581 bytes) Scanning Software for BeOS

Skeeter is a scanning application, written to communicate with scanners via the ScannerBe API. Thus, it can use any scanner for which a ScannerBe add-on has been written. You can look a screenshot of Skeeter in action, and view the documentation online.

Availability: A public Beta of Skeeter is available that works on R3/PPC. Click here to download. Work is proceeding on the port to R4 and Intel, and will be announced in the usual places.

A quick run through some of the more interesting features:

Live Preview Preview your image before scanning, make adjustments to image type, brightness, contrast, and scaling before committing a scan to a file, and without re-previewing. Zoom scans give you a better look at your selection, and a resizable preview area lets you make it as big as you want.
Standalone or Plugin Run Skeeter as a standalone application and save your scanned images to files. Or, using the included ScannerBe add-on, invoke Skeeter from any image editor or other application supporting the ScannerBe API, and scan directly into that application the way Photoshop Acquire Plugins or TWAIN data sources work.
Datatypes Save your scanned images to TIFF files using the built-in file writer, or any of the Datatypes formats supporting the type of image you are saving.
Drag and Drop Get your image looking just right in the preview area, then just drag and drop it to any application supporting the Dropped Message Format. Lets you just skip over those intermediate steps.
Screen Calibration A simple screen calibrator gives you an idea of the gamma correction required by your display. You can then scan to that value, or adjust the correction yourself to your liking.
Auto Exposure Select an area you are interested in, then click on the Auto Exposure button and have the brightness and contrast values automatically equalized for the "best" appearance. Manually tweak it from there to get exactly what you want. Big time-saver.
Thread-Rich Takes advantage of BeOS threading for increased performance during scanning and image processing.
Application Support A Becasso add-on is provided to give the plugin functionality described above. Scan directly to Becasso, and then look at the  source code in the ScannerBe SDK to see how easy it is to implement ScannerBe support in your own applications. More add-ons to come as app-writers make their add-on APIs available.

Supported scanners:

Go to Jim Moy's home page, BeOS page, or BeOS Scanner page